Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is an RPG released in September of 2000 by BioWare for the PC. BG2 is a sequel to the original Baldur's Gate, and was followed by many expansions.

Speed Runs

The Speed Demos Archive hosts Baldur's Gate II competition. The current proven World Record for a complete-game BG2 speedrun is 1 hour and 11 minutes, achieved by Dominic "DAMURDOC" Legault on October 25th, 2005.

There now exists a new record held by Eli 'Smilge' Chase done in 26 segments. He came in with a time of 23 minutes and 9 seconds, more than halving the time by Dominic. This run was posted to Speed Demos Archive in January 19th, 2010. This run only counts in-game time and edits out loading and saving screens. Note that Throne of Bhaal, the expansion to Shadow of Amn, was installed for this run, which changes Shadow of Amn in some minor ways further described on the SDA page.

Speed Run Strategies

Unfortunately, this game does not have as many runners as other games. Most of the strats here come from the actual run by Smilge, he revealed the results of extensive testing and really broke the game wide open compared to Dominic's run.

Here is a list of important strategies:

Talk Locking is when a character is given the command to talk to a neutral NPC, but then is quickly given another command. The NPC will wait to be spoken to and the character can attack and kill the NPC without it turning hostile for a few rounds.

Potion Swap Glitch is when you open the inventory screen while paused and click to use a potion in a quick slot. When you exit the inventory screen and un-pause, the potion will be consumed. However, if you swap that potion with another item, that item will be used instead, even if the character is restricted from conventionally using that item.

An encumbered player can have dialog with anyone in sight without walking up to them

Imoen can be hurt by the player to force her to leave early. This saves manually kicking her from the party.

Polymorphing to a large creature can be exploited to teleport over doors and walls

Entering dialog right as a cut-scene starts will break you out of that cut-scene

Using an item in a quick slot will deplete one charge of that item. If that item was not meant to be a consumable, then it will not be deleted if its stack size is 0. Repeating the use will cause the integer to roll over, since these values are stored as unsigned integers, this creates a stack of 65535 of that item.

Backstabbing is a very powerful ability where attacking from stealth gives a damage multiplier to the first attack. Polymorphing to a powerful creature allows for extremely lethal backstabs.

Invisibility is used to sneak by NPCs and access areas that could normally be lethal.

Please see the external link below for Smilge's extremely in-depth explanation of each part of the run. He goes into detail about everything he does and often how the tricks work.